Most cat owners know exactly how this goes. Cats go by the sun, not by the clock, and when it gets light early, they want to get up early.

Not a lot interesting is happening, though.

Caturday, and the cats have some evidence to dispose of.

Not a whole lot to report, actually. Friday was pretty normal, with the exception of some really obtuse and hard to track down error reporting from a Nagios plugin. When all the documentation for the plugin says “use -i foobar.pub to make everything work”, and the thing that works properly is “-i foobar”, then something is definitely wrong. Well, most of the time, people involved in the open source world hate to write documentation, so this is only to be expected. It still wasted some of my time.

It was only a matter of time before someone combined silly Net memes with bad math jokes and produced what you see to the left.

Got to read Schlock Mercenary: The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance. It’s pretty good. Schlock and Tagon’s Toughs sell some bad guys into slavery, take on some slave traders, participate in a CSI parody, and find out what everyone’s favorite artificial intelligence has been up to. Not an enormous amount of interesting stuff going on at work, actually, although I have now eaten lunch out 3 times this week. Sigh. Well, I forgot my lunch at home on Wednesday, and everyone wanted to go out today.

I’ve added the new Schlock book to the library, but haven’t reviewed it yet. I’ve also put in reviews for all the books in David Zindell’s Neverness series, which was snubbed by most critics as far as I can tell. The books have flaws—huge, gaping flaws. I still think they’re worth reading, though you may not be able to find them easily in your local library.

This Schlock book came in the mail late on Wednesday. Yay! I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but that day will come soon. What’s not to like about a bunch of sociopaths acting as a mercenary company, a pile of talking poop, a mad scientist, and an A.I. with delusions of grandeur who looks like a koala?

Hm. Just finished Bone Song by John Meaney. It’s OK but over the top in many ways. It’d make a very interesting-looking movie, for sure, but the plot wouldn’t satisfy anyone. It’s generally a bad idea to wait until 5 pages from the end and then kill the protagonist’s girlfriend, you know?

Lake of the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe, is totally different. It appears to be set on a huge generation ship, where the inhabitants have forgotten where they were going or that they’re even on a spaceship. High tech obviously exists, yet almost all the people have no ability to use it or interest in using it. If anyone other than Wolfe were writing this, there would be a few pages of reasonably lucid explanation of how that happened somewhere along the way. I don’t expect anything like that. It’s an interesting ride, like most of Wolfe’s books, but it feels like he’s spending a lot of time taunting the reader with really obscure allusions and references instead of explaining stuff or advancing the story.

Sunday, I got up way too early, then woke John up. He drove me to the airport. I got to the ticket counter, checked in, got my boarding pass, and started to go through security. Then I realized that my wallet was missing. I called John. My wallet was in the back seat, as it had fallen out of my pocket when I’d gotten out of the car. Fortunately, there was enough time for him to drive back to the airport and drop off my wallet. I barely made it through security and onto the plane in time, though.

Not a whole lot else happened on Sunday or Monday. Tuesday, not a whole lot happened either, but for some reason we all wanted to go out to lunch instead of eating at our desks.

Trivia: Everybody including Trevor was there. Nathan spent the weekend in Rocky Point with some crazy people who put the “fun” in “functional alcoholic”, some jet skis, and some 4-wheelers. Kelli’s annoyed at her exercise program. John’s still the best of us at making horrible puns. We were trailing pretty badly when I left, but what the heck.

Saturday, John and I spent most of the afternoon walking around downtown Detroit. This is not quite as dangerous as you might think, and can actually be boring. There are many more really tall buildings in Detroit than there are in Phoenix, and about 75% of them are vacant and in disrepair. It’s kind of sad when you think about it.

Went back to the hotel, changed out of regular clothes and into suits and ties, then got a cab to the wedding. Our cab driver was very vocal, pointing out abandoned buildings and talking about how they should all be torn down and new stuff put up in that location. Problem is, no one wants to do that because it’d cost a lot and there’s no guarantee of making any profit at all. Until there are investment opportunities that don’t scare the crap out of rich people, Detroit will remain half-abandoned.

The wedding was at the Grosse Pointe War Memorial, and they had spared no expense. It was outside, near a garden which bordered Lake St. Clair. The ceremony didn’t start on time (nothing complicated ever starts on time) but that was OK since Marcus and Elaina were late. The ceremony was short, probably because Dan was as sick as a dog. The reception was immediately afterwards in the war memorial itself, which was kind of nice. They had put 11 tables into a couple of rooms that would’ve fit 10 tables more easily, but oh well.

I was at a table with a bunch of Dan’s old college buddies. Several of Dan’s other old college buddies including Pizza Ben and Merchant Marine Mark were at another table. It looked like the rest of the tables were Sara’s family and friends. But we had bacon-wrapped scallops, shrimp, fried wontons, and bruschetta, and the open bar had large amounts of decent beer. There was also food, which was pretty good. Pizza Ben said, “Don’t live in New Jersey. It’s just not worth it. I love my job but I hate living there.” Graham was working as an archaeologist in Corktown (Irish suburb of Detroit) and he told us all about that. Clay is working for the government in some sort of capacity where he has to routinely qualify with firearms. This is not something I would’ve expected, but whatever. Dan S (one of Dan’s friends from Grand Rapids) and I had a lively discussion about various beers, and he said something about how the unemployment rate in Muskegon is almost 24%. Yikes.

At some point during the course of dinner, Marcus, Elaina, Graham, and Clay obtained a dinner roll, some toothpicks, some olives, a lime wedge, and a cherry. They then assembled these things into something that looked a lot like Jar-Jar Binks. We finally managed to give this impromptu food art to Dan. I think this was meant to recall Melvin the Frozen Undead Deer Head, or something like that. According to Graham, John and I look a lot like the Blues Brothers when we’re wearing suits and hanging out together.

The party went on for quite a while, and they eventually had music and dancing in another room. It was way too small for the number of people we had on hand. Whatever. I got out on the floor and shook a tail feather anyway. We eventually left around 12am after saying goodbye and good luck to Dan, mostly because Elaina had to work on Sunday. Marcus drove us to the hotel, which was nice of him since we saved cab fare.

OK, I can’t think of anything that would work as a picture for this entry. Anyway: Friday, I got on the plane, and everything was fine. About 20 minutes after takeoff, the captain said, “Um, someone left a valve open. This means all the water we had in our tanks has drained out. This means that the water faucets in the bathrooms don’t work, and we can’t make coffee.” So it wasn’t absolutely fatal, just really annoying.

Marcus picked me up when I landed in Detroit. John wasn’t available yet, so we hung out at Marcus’s place, then walked over to Marcus’s lab. Computational chemistry and working with RNA and DNA are less interesting than regular organic chemistry, or at least the instruments and chemicals used for the former are less likely to blow up in an exciting way.

Then Marcus’s girlfriend Elaina (possibly spelled wrong) came back from shopping, and we all sat around the apartment for a while. They’re still in the process of moving in, so there were a bunch of boxes everywhere and a temporary table made from boxes. John was going to be late, so we decided to eat without him at a place called Honest John’s near Wayne State. Dinner was both good and cheap. We also got to hear Elaina’s view of what’s wrong with medical school as it currently exists in the USA. Apparently, there’s far too much emphasis on memorizing a ton of unrelated information as quickly as possible, with no effort to put all this info into a useful framework. And there’s no time to assimilate the info you learn before you have to learn yet more stuff. I’ve never been to med school, so I can’t tell whether that’s true or not, but it certainly sounds like it might be.

That was about it for Friday. Lots more happened on Saturday, but that’ll be covered next entry.

This dog is seriously fluffy.

Leaving early Friday morning for Dan’s wedding. This may mean a serious lack of blog updates until I get back. I should have a little bit of spare time, but getting Net connectivity may be difficult, or expensive, or something. When I do get back, I’ll post some pictures and talk about how it all went.

Not a lot to say about Wednesday, other than that stupid crises will always tend to happen when I’m trying to eat lunch, and that they will consume far too much time. Ah well. I’m still reading through The Pentagon’s New Map: Blueprint for Action, and though I’m only 60% of the way through it, I think the author is being overly optimistic about almost everything he says.

Sometimes, you have to realize that you’re too fat to fit in those old clothes.

Trivia: We had a really hard time deciding on a team name. “It’s like watching retards fight” was apparently too offensive. We went with “Mohorovic Discontinuity” to see how the quizmaster would mispronounce it. The big excitement in everyone’s lives is that Spencer’s sister has had baby #2, and that Miguel is having some sort of party on July 4 in California. I’m not sure if I can attend that or not. Sarah and Nathan work for the public school system, so they’ve essentially got very little to do from now until August. We all wondered why a British reality TV show was the main topic on Larry King. The only thing that makes sense is “ratings”. People love it when a contestant shows up, sings a few songs well, gets millions of YouTube hits, then has a nervous breakdown. We were in second place when I left.